If Jesus showed up in your life today and just got in your face and said, "What do you want me to do for you?" What would you ask him for?
I had returned from a trauma response and bought a new toilet seat. The instructions showed how to install but nothing about how to replace the old seat. I’m crawling under the porcelain and trying to turn the plastic knob to unbolt the metal screw when the knob breaks apart. You Tube has no online instructions on what to do next. I struggle with a socket racket, then a crescent wrench and no luck removing this bolt. What I want Jesus to do is find someone who laughs at my dilemma and says, “no problem father, piece of cake.”
So Bartimaeus is this blind man. He's on the side of the road. Everyone tell him to shut up, be quiet, leave Jesus alone. But he persists. Do you have that persistence? Sure, yeah, we come to God and we say, "Hey God, we need this," or cry out to God for this or that. But do we have the persistence to keep coming back and saying, "Help me; help me.” I am on my back trying to maneuver the crescent wrench around the broken plastic knob and crying in despair, “help me.”
Bartimaeus was not confused about what Jesus could do for him. He knew it. He trusted it. He believed it. Are we confused about what God can do for us? I think sometimes we are.
Jesus takes people in the scriptures from the fringes of society, places them right at the center of the gospel. And what is the lesson? I think one lesson is that how a community treats its most vulnerable members says everything about that community. And that is true if that community is a family. It's true if that community is a neighborhood or a school community or a church community or a business community. How a community treats its most vulnerable members tells us almost everything about that community.
Jesus constantly takes these people from the fringes and places them at the center of the gospel, isn't he also asking us to do that? Isn't he also asking us to take people from the fringes of society and place them, in some way, at the center of our lives? And it's all too easy to stay in our spiritual blindness and pretend they don't exist and carry on with our lives. Lord, open my eyes so that I may see.
Lord I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that You open our eyes to sees the needs in our family, in our community and respond with your love and compassion. Oh yes, I texted my Lutheran builder and his kind and generous reply, “don’t worry, we will take care of this.” I cried in gratitude, bloodied and bruised from crawling around the tank and thanked the Lord.
